One of the criticisms against Android over Apple’s iOS, is that it doesn’t offer the same level of multitouch responsiveness and UI smoothness. This perceived ‘lagginess’ has been the subject of much debate, but we won’t go into that right now.

Well NVIDIA has been pimping its newest 4-PLUS-1 quad-core (plus fifth power-saving core) Tegra 3 system-on-a-chip (SoC) and created a new mobile touch technology, named DirectTouch, promising to improve multitouch experience. The DirectTouch architecture offloads part of the touch panel processing to the Tegra 3 CPU cores, reducing lag and increasing touch samples per second. This should improve user interface responsiveness and accuracy and of course gaming experience, without any expense on battery life.continue reading

The rising popularity of mobile devices has made some system on chips (SoCs) household names. One of these, is Qualcomm’s Snapdragon family of SoCs found in some of the finest smartphones and tablets. Qualcomm has been talking about its new Snapdragon S4 (“Krait”) architecture based on a 28 nm process for some time now and we’re expecting to finally see devices running on the SoC at Mobile World Congress next week. Yet, it had been unclear what the performance advantage would be from the new architecture.

The fellows over at AnandTech recently got to take home a Qualcomm S4 Mobile Development Platform, which is a posh name for a test smartphone, containing the first chip from the family, an MSM8960. The MSM8960 has dual 1.5GHz Krait cores, an Adreno 225 GPU and integrated support for practically all wireless radio technologies out there, including HSPA+ and LTE.continue reading

There is huge war raging behind the scenes on which chip will power the next generation of mobile devices. We have increasing demands from our smartphones and tablets and system-on-a-chip (SoC) manufacturers have to find ways of multiplying processing power, pushing more pixels on higher resolution screens while staying as power-frugal as possible. Samsung SoCs are a force to be reckoned with and last year’s Exynos 4210, found in the Samsung Galaxy S II, Samsung Galaxy Note and Samsung Galaxy Tab 7.7, literally crushed all other chips in benchmarks.

We heard of Samsung’s next generation Exynos 5250 SoC last November, and during its latest earnings call, Samsung said that it has already begun sampling to manufacturers and the 5250 will go into mass production in Q2 this year.continue reading